Mr. John McKeon:

I know from previous engagements that the Deputy does not subscribe to it either. However, I want to say that for our observers because we are about to discuss fraud which can get the headlines. In reality, the overwhelming majority of people who use this are absolutely entitled to payment and it is a valid payment. We must always balance trying to control against fraud and overpayments due to our own error against not frustrating people's entitlement. It will never be got right. Especially with the pandemic unemployment payment, if that balance had to be tipped one way or the other, our judgment was to tip it towards the presumption of honesty rather than dishonesty. That is how we would generally try to operate anyway.

In terms of the level of incorrect payment, if I could call it that, our own estimate, which may change, is that it is approximately 6%. This information was not available to the Comptroller and Auditor General when his team was in but the Deputy will be aware the Government took a decision to give full contributions, rather than credited contributions, to people who were in receipt of the pandemic unemployment payment. We have done an exercise, using the Revenue records and our own records, of matching when people were on PUP and when they were in employment and then filling in the gaps. From that, it looks like the figure is approximately 6%.

The question is how much of that is fraud and how much of it is for some other reason. When the pandemic unemployment payment was introduced, there was no social insurance conditionality to it. We spoke to the Minister at the time, and the Deputy may remember there were certain sectors of the economy which were very concerned that they were excluded, such as those in the informal economy who would normally go to our community welfare service but because of social distancing, restrictions and so on, they could not have access to that in the normal way.

Sex workers would be one such group. There were religious confraternities as well, across Christian and non-Christian faiths, such as mendicant orders which would not have been social insurance contributors and suddenly had no weekly collection and were on their uppers. In those situations, our choice was to tell them they should not be travelling and our offices were closed or to give them the payment. A decision was taken to give them the payment and then subsequently go back over it. There were those kind of cases, which are not fraud. They may be irregular payments but they are not fraud.

The other issue the Deputy was raised was self-employment. Self-employment is a difficulty because the returns are made annually and when they are made they are made on a whole-year basis. The Revenue returns are, therefore, for the entire year, rather than week by week throughout the year. We are setting up a project to do this, as recommended by the Comptroller and Auditor General. We have to look and compare the income of the people who declared themselves as self-employed for the 2019 year and for the 2020 year and make an assessment as to which of those it looks as though their income was sustained, even though they were claiming the PUP and go back and review each of those cases on an individual basis. That is what we intend to do.